Details
- magazine article: A protected rite? Defending the seal of confession from legal challenge
- author(s): Helen Costigane
- journal: America (12/Aug/2013)
- issue: volume 209, issue 4, page 15
- journal ISSN: 0002-7049
- publisher: America Press, Inc
- keywords: Church and state, Confession, Criminal liability, Laws, regulations and rules, Priests, Religious aspects
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Abstract
The potential consequences for a priest refusing to break the sacramental seal are also explored in Alfred Hitchcock's film "I Confess" (1953), in which a priest, Father Logan, hears the confession of his part-time gardener who, in the course of robbing one of his employers, has killed him. Because of the binding nature of the seal of confession, the priest cannot tell the police anything he now knows about this crime. According to a report in CathNews of New Zealand (Nov. 16, 2012), Cardinal George Pell, archbishop of Sydney, said that priests should refuse to hear the confessions of suspected child abusers in order to ensure that they are not then bound by the confidentiality of the confessional.
